But as we build new pipeline, we are still shipping oil and gas through many of the old pipelines. Really old pipelines, in some cases. About forty-five percent of U.S. crude oil pipeline is more than fifty years old. Even pipeline laid into the ground in the 1920s and before (think the There Will Be Blood era) is still operating today.

Why does the age of a pipeline matter? Safety. Failures. Leaks. Spills. Different ages of pipeline have different safety concerns:

Compare Oklahoma and Arkansas, where more pipeline is from the 1940s than any other decade, to North Dakota, where more pipeline is from the 2010s – even though we’re less than halfway through it – than any other decade.

Nationwide, the fifties still dominate: More operating crude oil pipeline (nearly 14,000 miles) was built in the 1950s than in any other decade. The next closest decades (the 1960s, the 2000s, and the 1940s) each only have around 7,000 miles.

This graph shows the age profile of existing U.S. crude oil pipeline:

And here’s a table summarizing the age of crude oil pipeline in the U.S.:

Because this data only tells us the age of pipelines that are currently in use, it doesn’t tell us is how many total miles of crude oil pipeline were built in each decade but are no longer operating.

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Jordan Wirfs-Brock was Inside Energy's first data journalist, based in Colorado. Now she's living in the San Juan Islands, but is still helping us out. When she's not wrangling data, she enjoys running up and down mountains, doodling, playing board games and brewing beer.

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There’s an invisible network connecting every corner of the United States. Without it, cars wouldn’t start and lights wouldn’t turn on. At 2.6 million miles, if it were stretched out, it would reach around the Earth more than a hundred times. Chances are, you’ve never noticed it. The nation’s sprawling pipeline network is buried underground, out of sight and out of mind. But it wasn’t always the case that pipelines crisscrossed the nation, bringing energy where it was needed.